Saturday, February 14, 2015

Putin’s Incredibly Shrinking Russian World – Why He Insisted on Minsk for Talks

Paul
Goble

Staunton, February 14 – Despite his
success in intimidating some European governments into inaction or even
willingness to come to terms with the results of his aggression, Vladimir Putin
in fact is having to cope with an ever-shrinking Russia world as his insistence
on Minsk as a venue for talks about Ukraine shows.

Indeed, had European leaders
understood that the Kremlin leader could hardly tolerate talks anywhere else,
they would have been in a far better position to make more demands not only of
Putin concerning Ukraine but also of Alyaksandr Lukashenka, their official “host”
in the Minsk talks.

In a comment for the Charter 97
portal, Iryna Khalip, a Belarusian journalist who writes regularly for Moscow’s
“Novaya gazeta,” says that Putin needed his meeting with the German chancellor
and the French president to be in Minsk “and not in any other place in the
world” for three reasons (charter97.org/ru/news/2015/2/13/139451/).

First of all, she says, Putin chose
Belarus because it is one of the few places outside of Russia where he feels
himself to be “the master.” That is not the case in Kazakhstan, and the Kremlin
leader isn’t inclined to travel beyond the borders of his Eurasian Economic
Community whose rulers defer to him most of the time.

Second, Belarus was about the only
place where the Donbas separatists “could feel themselves safe” and where they would
“not only not be arrested but would be able to sit at one table with the adults.”That gave them the status Putin wanted them
to have, and just their being at the same talks was “sufficient” for his
purposes.

And third, “by insisting on Minsk as
the site of the meeting, Vladimir Putin reduced to nil all the declarations of
the leaders of the EU countries made after the mass arrests” in Belarus in
December 2010. At that time, they said that any high level contacts between the
EU and Belarus were impossible.

Despite those declarations, Angela
Merkel and Francois Hollande came to Minsk, where they were hosted by the
author of those arrests, Alyaksandr Lukashenka, and said nothing about the freezing
of former presidential candidate Nikolay Statkevich or anyone else. He remains
in prison. Had the Europeans insisted, Putin would have convinced Lukashenka to
release him.

Khalip then addresses the larger problems of this venue as a
summit.Summit meetings, she points out,
are not occasions for negotiations but rather “the last stage” in such a
process. But Merkel and Hollande acted otherwise and that gave Putin the
opportunity to “wrap them around his little finger” and get what he wanted out
of the session without yielding anything in return.

“The
difference between Merkel and Hollande, on the one hand, and Putin and
Lukashenka on the other is that the latter two not once for many years has kept
his word,” Khalip writes. The Europeans are accustomed to the idea that
promises will be kept, while Putin and Lukashenka assume that promises are made
for anything but that.

And
the Europeans, or at least Merkel and Hollande, suffer from another problem as
well: they can’t afford to take part in a meeting after which they would have
to say to their electors at home: “forgive us, we weren’t able” to reach an
agreement. That means they need to know going into a meeting what will be agreed
to or they will be manipulated.

This
need also means that the Europeans do not always understand what the meeting is
about or what the other side wants. Putin knew what he wanted at Minsk and it
was not about the Donbas. He had much bigger goals in mind, including the end
of sanctions, an end to his isolation, and a reaffirmation of his role in
Belarus.

“Europe
in these negotiations thus demonstrated all its weaknesses,” Khalip says,
including its “complete inability to defend itself, its lack of a strategy
toward the Russia of today, its indifference to the territories of others,” and
its willingness to pay off bandits like Putin and Lukashenka in order to
continue to live quietly until they make new threats and new demands.